Point-of-Care Digital Innovation for Wound Self-Care Patient Education: Instant Personalized Dressing Brochure Tool

Background: To successfully perform wound self-care, patients need to complete individualized multi-step dressing changes. Education is pivotal in helping patients navigate these steps to avoid adverse outcomes. Literature demonstrates that customized educational visual aids used at the point of care enhance wound knowledge, self-care, and wound healing. Despite being effective, developing these aids often require time-consuming preparation for each patient. We aimed to develop a digital point-of-care solution to expedite the creation of personalized educational materials in English and Spanish to support patient self-care.

Method: Using literacy-supportive methods, the solution was developed as a tool within a clinical decision support web-application as follows:

● Paper-based visual aids in English and Spanish with general wound information, change schedule, and product pictures were piloted and optimized.

● Digital tool development with robust programming language, library, and framework to instantly generate a personalized dressing change brochure for patients.

● Tool was tested by patients and clinicians at three wound clinics. Clinicians utilized a two-step approach that included teaching dressing changes step-by-step using the digitally customized brochure. At follow-up, a survey was conducted utilizing a one-group post-test study design to evaluate effectiveness.

Results: Evaluation was completed by clinicians (n=5) and patients (n=17).

Most patients (94.1%) found the brochure to be “very helpful”/”helpful” (average score: 4.6; 1= “not helpful”, 5= “very helpful”). Specific areas of the brochure received scores from 4.1–4.6.

Clinicians found brochures to be “very helpful”/”helpful” in supporting teaching to all patients (100%, average score 4.8) and in increasing patient adherence to the treatment plan (94.1%, average score: 4.5).

Conclusion: A digital solution that instantly creates personalized, multi-step dressing change brochures for patients in English and Spanish was found to be beneficial in improving patient understanding and adherence to wound self-care. To our knowledge, it is the first point-of-care solution of its kind.